California Dreams

I knew I shouldn’t, but I went and tried the Xpress Mail on my 8525 that CingularAT&T had provided for my phone… The end result was that I had to hard reset my phone, and because ActiveSync failed to restore my data, I had to manually reinstall all applications and I lost my contacts for good.

The Xpress Mail installation seems extremely invasive. Maybe it needs to be for simple devices, but I don’t see why that would have to be the case for a phone running WM5 or later. The installer asks for your phone number (what has that to do with email?), your ISP, login and password. Then it seems that it passes my login and password (in this case my Comcast account) to AT&T. There are no security settings anywhere, so I don’t know if all that is even being transmitted in the clear somewhere. The Xpress Mail UI has just a handful of preferences, and none that seemed to be of interest to me. For what it is worth, it did work with my Comcast email, and seemed to integrate that into Pocket Outlook.

But I really did not like the fact that I had no firm idea what had happened with my account information. So I reset my Comcast password, and uninstalled Xpress Mail. And started noticing major problems. It used to take just a couple of seconds to connect to network after reset, and now it was taking about a minute. Battery was draining at an alarming rate (full charge in the evening, and battery drained empty sometime during the night).

So now I have spent a day trying to restore everything, and all is good now except for the lost contacts. The additional software I installed included PTTFix, BART Quick Planner, Google Maps, GSPlayer2, PIM Backup (won’t lose my data anymore!), Pocket Putty, QMail3 (for Comcast email), Skype, vncviewer, WM6 Remote Desktop, and zsIRC.

Since I upgraded my 8525 to Windows Mobile 6, I have been unable to read Comcast email. Granted, it was really slow even with WM5, but it worked. Not so with WM6. I talked to both Comcast and AT&T support, but no luck. I did get a phone number for HTC support, but haven’t made the call, and rather figured I’d live with it.

But enough is enough. I finally figured I’d search for a good, free mail client for Windows Mobile. It seems QMail is hands down the best in that category. QMail is really capable, but it is seriously lacking in the documentation department, and even most of what is available is in Japanese. Luckily I did find an old guide, which clarified some issues (the latest version comes with SSL builtin, so you can disregard that part of the guide). There is also an English FAQ that explains how to create filters and actions to automatically download only messages that are newer than X number of days and download messages automatically every Y minutes.

QMail had no difficulty with Comcast’s POP or SMTP servers; even TLS works.

I have been syncing my Cingular 8525 (upgraded to Windows Mobile 6) over bluetooth using ActiveSync 4.5 with Windows XP, but last week I had to install Office 2000 (I had managed to use OpenOffice only for the past 4 years or so), and the Office 2000 setup messed up my sync.

It seems the installation (and all the updates, mind you) first of all deleted the virtual COM port (server) I had set up to enable ActiveSync over bluetooth. This is sync-over-bluetooth is a tricky thing. All the instructions tell you to first create a virtual COM port (server/incoming) on your computer. The way to do this differs, unfortunately, and depends on the bluetooth drivers. For Dell Inspiron 9300 you can do this using the Bluetooth Local COM shortcut in Control Panel. Then, in ActiveSync you need to go File > Connection Settings… and check the box to allow connections to the following, where you select the COM port just created. Then on the phone you initiate the connection, first pairing the device, and then doing the sync.

Unfortunately more often than not, you will run into one of two problems on the phone. The first is that the COM port you created on the desktop may not be available for your device. A little experimentation will hopefully find a common port for both. The second problem is that even after all this, the phone may not see the ActiveSync service being offered over bluetooth. It seems deleting the virtual COM port from the server and the pairing on the device and recreating everything from scratch eventually leads to the desired result, and sync may start working.

The last problem I run into was that now syncing seems to work except that the Outlook 2000 is too old, and while the sync tries to start it, Outlook 2000 will crash. Outlook 2002 is required, but unfortunately Cingular did not ship Outlook 2002 with my 8252 device (just a 60 day evaluation version), so I would need to spend additional $100 to get my device to properly sync with my desktop. That is just lame.

Nevertheless, it does seem like syncing is now working again, albeit much slower than it used to be and there is also the Outlook 2000 crash so I am not sure what is not synced.

I have been itching to start working on some Mobile Firefox stuff, and now I finally got some time to install the prerequisites. It is quite a bit of stuff. But even the build worked!

Unfortunately DNS is not working in the, hmm, not sure what to call it, but the system that is running in the Xephyr window. I even looked at Maemo intructions on networking problems (the Matrix reference is hilarious), but it still does not work. Seems a lot of people have had the same problem, but my nsswitch.conf and resolv.conf seem to be correct.

At this point I suspect this might be due to me running Scratchbox in a VMWare guest, with NAT networking. Unfortunately it seems VMWare does not support bridged networking with wireless, which is what I need. I guess I could live with this setup for a little while, though.

Update: It seems something was wrong with the /etc/resolv.conf in scratchbox after all. I was sure I checked it yesterday, but today it contained only localhost. After matching that up with the VMWare guest’s version, Maemo got DNS.

I finally finished my first Google Android application which I started about 15 days ago, which was much, much longer than I expected it would take and I am still not totally happy with the way things turned out. (I did not work every day, nor did I spend full days at it, but still it compared to the 12 hours it took to create similar Python+Tkinter application it was certainly a disappointment.) Of course, this being my first Java program I guess I should not have expected miracles. My second post on the subject shed some early light on the issues I was facing.

I can sum my major Android frustrations as follows:

• XML is required for UI
• No drop down list control (I used Spinner instead)
• No multicolumn list control (I used GridView instead)

I also run into some bugs, like some bug in GridView that caused crashes whenever the layout changed. Luckily there was a simple workaround with focus.

I quite liked the Eclipse plugin for Android development.

So what is the application I created? Since I have been learning new technologies by creating Caltrain schedule applications (previously with Python and Javascript), I figured I should do the same with Android. And thus Caltroid was born. It has one additional feature compared to the other schedule applications, in that it can automatically find the nearest Caltrain station using GPS information. It is not bug free (what would you expect with 0.1 release) but I think it would already be useful to someone with an Android device.

You can get the source with Subversion.

Update: You can download the complete project directory with Caltroid.apk and all. Grab your copy here. Please note that I work on Linux so files will have Linux newlines.

Update 2: I made Caltroid project page.

Like I mentioned in my previous post, it seems it is not possible to do the UI purely programmatically using the Android Java API. Or if it is, it is either so obvious I don’t see it, or so hard I just haven’t figured it out yet. I finally decided I’ll just hop on the XML GUI bandwagon.

Which lead me to use the DroidDraw program to design my GUI, which is pretty simple and nice to use even at though it is so new (expect some glitches, but compared to working by hand you’ll be glad you used it). It also comes with some nice tutorials, and a visual guide to the UI elements (another thing which seems to be missing from the official Android documentation, by the way).

I’ve been tinkering with Android for a few days now, and I am bit less thrilled now. The documentation which at first blush looked great, is actually pretty minimal at places, for example the API. It would be really helpful if there were links from the API to samples where the API was used. There are also places where the API is incomplete, with notes that more is to come. There is also something strange on the official Google Android web pages which keeps Firefox consuming about 10% CPU for every window that has Android documentation pages open.

It seems like you cannot construct a UI using just the Java API; you have to refer to XML files that specify at least some parts of the layout. All the samples I have seen so far in fact go straight to XML to show how the UI is done. This seems a bit backwards to me. I would expect one to have complete freedom to do the UI in Java, and the XML format is just a nice alternative to have. Like in the wxWidgets project. The XML also has some strangeness to it in my opinion, namely with the use of @-sign to point to other resources in attribute values. And it is kind of pity that this is yet another XML language for UI, when there are already other languages available.

The community has started some pretty nice resources for Android developers. anddev.org is my favorite. Another I found is Triled. Another good tactic, as usual, is to search the web. Although with a project as new as Android, the chances of finding anything different from Google’s official pages or those two community sites are pretty slim.

I just took the first look at Android documentation, and I am pretty pleased so far with the quality. I didn’t really have any major problems with downloading and installing the SDK, and Eclipse plugin. (What I did waste time on was trying to figure out if my Eclipse installation had JDT and WST installed - I think I have JDT but not WST, and trying to install WST run into an unclear plugin dependency problem.)

Creating and running the HelloAndroid sample was easy, and worked great. Now I am off to study the SDK documentation to build something with it…